Teleworkers drive broadband market

At last, broadband service providers have a surefire way to know which applications customers will pay for: Just follow the teleworkers.

Forthcoming research from analyst firm Parks Associates reveals that while consumers are interested in a variety of broadband services - everything from home networks to content filtering to environmental controls - that doesn't mean they're ready (or willing) to pay for them.

The report, "Broadband access @ home III, a survey of 10,800 Internet households," won't be released until Nov. 1, but Parks gave Net.Worker a sneak peek of the results in six categories we selected: Internet backup, VPN, home security, environmental controls, videoconferencing (or video calling) and Internet telephony.

To yield richer data, Parks broke down the respondents by teleworkers and nonteleworkers, and then cross-tabulated the results. For the purposes of this report, Parks considered a teleworker someone who works at home at least eight hours per week during regular business hours, connecting to the corporate network. (Home-based business owners and those who take work home after hours fell into the consumer group.)

To help determine respondents' degree of interest in services vs. their willingness to pay for them, Parks asked them to rate their interest on a scale from 1 to 7, then used a proprietary method called the Relative Strength Formula to translate consumer interest into concrete, discernible consumer action/purchasing behavior, says Michael Greeson, Parks' senior analyst and director of broadband research.

"Using this formula, we've been within a margin of error of 10% for three years on all of our forecasts," he says.

While the report is targeted mainly to software vendors and broadband service providers, it also offers insight for network executives and small businesses tasked with helping create telework policies and providing applications to remote workers.

In particular, the results for data backup and VPN indicate that firms don't support their remote workers as well as they should. Teleworkers are 27.5% more likely to buy data back-up service than nonteleworkers and 19% more likely to buy VPN services. Nearly 30% of teleworkers want to subscribe to a VPN service; 24.6% want to subscribe to a data back-up service. Also significant, 24.8% of nonteleworkers would buy VPN services, a group likely comprising occasional teleworkers and employees who take work home after hours and want to connect to the corporate network.

As important, the survey proves teleworkers are better educated than nonteleworkers in the need for secure remote connections and file safety. The question is, do network executives want their teleworkers contracting with consumer broadband providers for corporate services? Probably not.

The results also show that teleworkers will be the early adopters of connected home technology - 22.4% of teleworkers are more willing than nonteleworkers to subscribe to an environmental monitoring service and 22.9% more likely to subscribe to a home security service. Nearly one-quarter of teleworkers (24.7%) is willing to buy home security services; 21.3% would pay for environmental monitoring.

"Teleworkers are a great target audience for every new type of service," Greeson says. "I can throw a dart at the teleworker space and find a service that's going to have a lucrative market."

The gap narrows between the groups in video calling/conferencing and Internet telephony (17.9% and 14%, respectively), which implies a large number of consumers, not just teleworkers, understand the value and are willing to pay for such services. About 21% of teleworkers would subscribe to such a service - that's a 20% difference between teleworkers and nonteleworkers.

"People understand and like the idea of adding video to a traditional phone call," Greeson says. "It makes sense to them."

Smaller companies might welcome the thought of remote workers subscribing to corporate services from their service providers, but larger companies would find themselves supporting an ever-more-complicated remote workforce using a hybrid and inconsistent mix of company and personal services.

If the majority of teleworkers already pay for their broadband connections, would the company also expect them to pay for VPN and data back-up services? Ideally, the company should pay for everything the teleworker needs to do his job.

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